Why I Oppose the HCR Bill: The Perfect is the Enemy Of the Good

It is better to empower the people to be more charitable by letting them keep their money in order to give it than to get the government in the health care business. It is both cheaper and more moral.

Will people fall through the cracks if this is left up to the people? Yes. And it will be the same for a government program. Don’t let the "perfect" be the enemy of the "good", especially if the "perfect" is clearly known to be unobtainable.

Trying to obtain that perfection via government will do 2 things. First, it will not happen. Second, it will give more power and money to a government already awash in both. For those that already despise dealing with a more local insurance company, multiply that for dealing with the government. (Including, yes, "death panels", just like they have in Canada, in behavior if not title.)

But will government involvement, if not perfect, be at least better than we have now? Perhaps we could ask that cancer patient in Alberta (follow that link up there) who came to Minnesota to get lifesaving surgery. Or you could read the article in the London Times about how the liberal Labour party hid the truth about patient neglect in their National Health Service. If your measure of "success" is how many people have health insurance, then sure, it would be "better". But if you factor in the quality of care, not so much.

Because our system isn’t perfect, don’t make a deal with the devil. Our founding fathers felt government to be a necessary evil. They were students of history that saw the natural tendency of government and tried to avoid those problems when they wrote the Constitution so that government’s power was limited. We are "unwriting" those limits if we do this.